Linux Foundation Video Contest ... Winner?

 Well, the Linux Foundation has released their winning video today...


Do I not sound impressed? Yeaaaa.....

I'm actually not that impressed. I have to admit, that I found the winning video to be very dull.  It overly simplifies Linux... actually... does it even mention Linux?? It doesn't highlight how Linux brings people together from all walks of life. It doesn't say how Linux runs on verything from toasters to supercomputers or that it runs on more devices than any other OS in the world.

Please also forgive me for saying this, but ... in the winning video, the narrator's voice silently screams "people who use Linux are geeks, and they can barely speak, much less maintain a complex body of software through social interaction!!" Man, the guy's voice reminds me of the one giving the Grails webinar... ugghh... and I don't have very fond memories about Grails.

I thought that some of the finalists were a little too light-hearted. Some of them were slightly spooky, but I would have thought that a quirky, funny, yet clever video would have snuck through to the end. Alas, I was wrong.

My 5 favourites were this, this, this, this, and this, in no specific order, if only because they captivated or identified with the audience somehow. I would have even preferred the Novell Meet Linux ads over the winner of the contest (Flame suit on!). I would have even preferred the TrueNuff spoof advertisements over the winner, in spite of not being pro-linux whatsoever.

They would have been better off showing a clip of somebody playing NumptyPhysics.

EEE 702 Has Poor Graphics Performance

I've owned my EEE 8G for quite a long time and also fully customized the software on it as a binary Gentoo distribution. However, one thing that I've found noticeably lacking is the performance of full-screen video. The video device on the EEE is an Intel 915 Mobile Graphics chip, which I believe uses shared memory.

If you know of a way to improve the video framerate of the EEE, then please post your Xorg.conf and related mesa / intel driver versions.

Sidereel Firefox Search Plugin

Following the really easy template at Digital Alchemy, I've written a small Firefox search plugin for Sidereel, a probably not so legal site where you can watch lots of cool movies and TV shows for free. Download the plugin (really just an xml file) by right-clicking here and selecting 'Save Target As...' or 'Save Link As...' and save it in your searchplugins folder.

The searchplugins folder can be found on Linux systems simply with

find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name 'searchplugins'
For example, running the above command on my Linux system gives:

/home/[username]/.mozilla/firefox/[userprofile]/searchplugins

For Mac users, it's probably something like

/Users/[username]/.mozilla/firefox/[userprofile]/searchplugins

I'm guessing that on windows its something like

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\[userprofile]\searchplugins

Note (at least for linux): the searchplugins folder is not created automatically. You must either create it manually, or download an existing search plugin (e.g. Wikipedia).

You will need to restart Firefox for the plugin to be detected.